


Wind Won't Blow

by Port



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU end of S3, Gen, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-02-28
Updated: 2009-02-28
Packaged: 2018-03-04 04:03:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2908649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Port/pseuds/Port
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam Winchester had a childhood of potholes,<br/>crowded by traffic... crowded<br/>by Dean, always sitting too close in the back seat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wind Won't Blow

**Author's Note:**

> Infinite thanks to Smilla and carina84 for beta'ing and encouragement. Any errors or weirdness left over is all on me. Concrit/comments are appreciated!

1.

Sam Winchester had a childhood of potholes,  
crowded by traffic... crowded  
by Dean, always sitting too close in the back seat.

The gardens of Sam's youth were pebbled with gravel.  
Browning pansies grew amid discarded butts, but Dean  
never let Sam linger over motel plots.  
He  
harried Sam to greening swimming pools and held  
his hand across the rushing streets.

Sam Winchester, very small, had a chewed and grubby quilt.  
Blue cornered and grey, it covered him  
and Dean. Mom made Dean one too,  
but all Dean would say was it burned away.

Sam burned from time to time. By the window,  
heading south, blankets not so long forgotten.  
Dean still slumped too close, silent, as he wonted  
with Dad up front, occasionally whispering.

2.

Sam never warmed to children. They held  
a secret thing; a world in one eye, a distance in the other.  
A world motel-room small, never cramped;  
a distance like a garden path, wonder 'round  
every bend, and no end,  
no end, no end.

Sam has no relics of childhood. No quilts or toys,  
no Crayola drawings. No photos. For a time, after Jess, he had  
Dean, so bizarrely like a child, cajoling  
him down the ruined road.  
Dean in Dad's jacket, though no longer  
wholly a parent.

Dean understood children. He saw into their  
distance, like a spectator, wishing it for them.  
Eighteen years of surrogacy,  
and he understood a child's eternity.

Sam wishes he knew how he gave such a thing to  
Dean...  
how he gave a thing he never had.

3.

A while back, the end of Dean's year slid in.  
Sam still flinches from the shock up his fingers,  
across his palms, lingering at his wrists.

They say in hospice settings, the dead come to visit.  
They come to hold your hand, not pulling, but easing.  
They listen before you speak, hear before you say;  
they've already forgiven. They won't leave you to linger.

Sam saved  
his brother from the fire.  
Dean lay choking, Lilith and her dogs whimpering  
away, away, away....  
Dean stopped choking.  
Dean's ragged chest seeped.  
Dean exhaled a long, final gasp, off to burn.  
Sam had a moment, and a stolen knife.

A while back, the end of a year slid in.  
Sam still flinches from the shock up his fingers,  
across his palms, lingering at his wrists.

4.

All the mourners in the world have it better than Sam.  
Jess's mother had said, "I can feel her with me."  
Jess's father had murmured, brokenly,  
of waiting to reunite.  
Sam can't even pretend.  
He only has a knife he'll never use again.

Sam lies in bed, remembering the lousy gardens of his youth,  
and he follows leviathan highways, straining  
for the feel of Dean  
drowsing against his side.  
But that was in the back seat, and so far behind him.

Childhood is a wasted land, a garden Dean tried  
too hard to grow, while Sam worked hard enough to leave.  
He can almost reconstruct it,  
almost sew together the scraps of memory  
he so thoughtlessly rent.

5.

Sam turns at night, restless. He should sleep better, knowing  
Dean isn't suffering, will never suffer. Instead,  
he wonders about hospice, and the redemptive quality of death;  
reunion and permanent absence;  
the fact that, for the first time, he can't feel  
Dean close by.

Sam turns and turns, and buries himself in bed,  
and retreats to a half-remembered world,  
a tiny space reaching so far.  
It's the only paradise he'll ever share with his brother.  



End file.
